Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall

I see (based on what you wrote below) that you're off on your own thing, but I don't think this is helpful at all.

Thought I was responding to something you said, so sorry not to be helpful.

First, the woman who threw slurs around like they're second nature may be a public figure. But I want to understand why public figures choose a certain approach when they are in damage-control mode. I want to understand why a complete denial in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary is the goal. I want to know why this works. You want to toss out all instances of a public figure explaining how not racist they are as insincere. I'm not saying it's not insincere. I want to know why they choose this insincere strategy as opposed to others.

Second, her reaction is exactly the same as the reactions I see in non-public figures. I find it amazing that people who say racist shit see themselves as not even a little bit racist. Is it denial? Is it pure good-bad binary? Are they let off the hook by other whites?

Third, how do those things relate to each other? Is the approach by the public figure based on what white people do in private--say amazingly racist shit and then act like they're not racist amongst themselves such that they can move on? Are they ever called on it such that they have to do that? Is it just an ostrich approach--hide your head in denial until it blows over?

The public-figure response works both because it mirrors what a lot of people would say in a private conversation and because it ends the public story. Any other response -- denial, silence, extensive shared introspection -- invites follow-up. The "I'm not a racist" response enables the public figure to move on to other topics instead of digging deeper.

Is it denial? Yes. Is it put good-bad binary? Pretty much -- racists are bad, and most people see themselves as good, or want to, so therefor they can't be racists. Are they let off the hook by other whites? Usually. But it depends on whose opinion they care about.

I understand that you don't want to discuss or think about it, but it would be nice if you stopped telling me that I shouldn't be interested in how public figures react to their racism being exposed.

If you are interested in it, it's not my place at all to tell you to stop. If you want to get at the psychology involved, IMO it's not helpful to parse what are basically press releases. But if you're interested in why the press releases use those particular talking points, then, hey, that's the place to look.

A lot in here, but rest assured, I've been saying that 35-40% of this country is irretrievably racist for many years--well before Trump took office. He's captured that group through his racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti-intellectual cult of personality. They love him precisely because of those things.

I agree. I think it's possible that some of those people were not so irretrievably racist but that their identification with their cohort has made them less interested in what other people outside their cohort think or care about. As I've said before, conservative is fundamentally about triggering libs, and racism triggers libs, so conservatives more and more see an attraction to racism.

I'm not sure how to move past that. So, I'll stick to trying to understand the stuff that interests me.

There is so much argument in bad faith coming from conservatives that it's very hard to figure out how to really tell what they care about. Maybe that is the fundamental problem (with trying to understand them better).

eta: I was just looking at the Facebook page of a former partner at my former firm, a very smart woman who is temperamentally conservative and no longer as interested in masking it. Her posts on current events (which is most of them) are, again and again, reacting resentfully to the dominant narrative -- Jussie Smollett, global warming and climate change, etc. It's not stream of consciousness, it's stream of resentment. How does someone who has a shit-ton of money and had a great career get so resentful? I recognize that I've moved off race, but thing is, if you had a conversation with her about this stuff and asked about her views, she wouldn't get at the resentment and grievance that ties it all together. So if you are interested in how someone like her thinks, what do you do to drill down?